Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2004:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2006:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2007:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2008:
January / February / March
April / May

Current entries

Wednesday, August 28, 2002, 11:40 pm

Political Graveyard update. I am happy and relieved to report that I have at last completed and put online a completely new version of my web site, The Political Graveyard.

The new site lists over 107,000 politicians (compared with about 81,000 in the last one), and introduces a number of new features:

Politicians Portrayed on Money -- U.S. or Confederate coins or currency. It is ironic that Andrew Jackson, lifelong foe of paper money, has his visage printed on so much of it these days -- but that practice started less than 20 years after his death. Jackson is one of only two political figures (George Washington is the other) whose portraits have appeared both on U.S. and Confederate bills.
Politicians Who Were (or took part in a) First. Many of these are politico-demographic milestones (the first woman, the first Catholic, the first Republican, the first black, the first Chinese-American, etc.). Quite a few of the rest are accomplishments of politicians in other fields: the builder of the first flax mill in America, author of the first book about American law, captain of the first U.S. war vessel to carry the Stars and Stripes into battle, and so on.
Gay or Lesbian Politicians, with 31 listed: Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin and Jim Kolbe and Gerry Studds and more than two dozen others.
There are a bunch of additional organizations for which I have (incomplete) lists of politician members, including the American Dental Association and the once-mighty Anti-Saloon League. But the Freemasons continue to lead the list, with 2,294 politician members.
The Politicians Named for Other Politicians page is back. George Washington has the most pols named for him (84), followed distantly by Benjamin Franklin (46), Thomas Jefferson (35), Andrew Jackson (28), Henry Clay (20), and 53 others, including such unlikely heroes as Roscoe Conkling, Franklin Pierce, Chester A. Arthur, and Millard Fillmore.
The Political Families list has been expanded. The threshold for including a family has been reduced from four politician members to three, and each family now gets a separate page with full information about all members. Of particular interest are the Adams, Roosevelt, Taft, and Kennedy families, but there are more than four hundred others both famous and obscure.
I already had a page for each of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., listing politicians who were born, lived, died, or buried in that area. For example, here's the page on Schenectady County, N.Y.. The heads of those pages now have more links relevant to that particular county, including the county's official web site if available. And now for the first time I'm treating Alaska's boroughs and census areas as counties, giving each its own page, even though some are conspicuously lacking in politician data.
Entries for some politicians now feature links to biographies and histories about them at Amazon.com. Naturally, any actual book sales that result will generate a small kickback to me. Not enough, unfortunately, to let me quit my day job and work on the web site full time.

The popup ads, which were NOT my idea, are supposed to go away by tomorrow. If they didn't annoy me so much, I'd be temped to say: hey, even the hoary, dignified New York Times web site has popup ads now. They do generate about an extra $10/day. But I can't stand them.

I hope people have as much fun browsing The Political Graveyard as I have putting it together!

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Comments:

Paul, 8/31/2002: Great to have you back!

Wednesday, August 14, 2002, 5:05 pm

Oops. Well, I was wrong about the outcome of the congressional primary: John Dingell was renominated by an unexpectedly wide margin.

I spent the day of the election cooped up in a couple rooms in the city hall in Taylor, a Dingell stronghold, watching the absentee votes be counted. Since poll challengers at an absentee ballot counting board can see how the votes are coming out during the day, they're required to sign an oath not to reveal anything before the polls closed. They also locked us all in: 20 election workers, two poll challengers (I was there for Rivers, and a former Taylor city councilwoman represented Dingell), and a cop. No one could leave until 8:00 pm.

Taylor had over 3,900 absentee ballots -- an unprecedented number in a primary. Most of them voted in the Democratic primary, and over three-quarters went to Dingell -- a margin which I knew meant he had won districtwide.

Detailed analysis of the vote is still lacking, but voter turnout in the Downriver industrial areas was quite robust and very pro-Dingell. The Dingell campaign and its allies distributed absentee ballot applications throughout the Downriver communities; relentless recorded "robo-calls" reminded voters to send in the applications, and then when the ballots arrived, to send in the ballots. These calls annoyed some people -- one Dearborn resident, old enough to remember Dingell's father in Congress, announced that he would vote for Rivers because he hated Dingell's computerized phone calls -- but they were effective, and almost all of those votes went to Dingell.

There is also some indication that a few thousand Republicans, especially in Monroe County, crossed over into the Democratic primary to vote for Dingell, just as thousands of Democrats voted for McCain in the Republican presidential primary two years ago. Here in Michigan, where even the concept of party registration is political anathema, voters are given a ballot with two party sections, and get to choose in private which one to participate in.

Almost any glib conclusion that could be drawn from the Dingell/Rivers race is flatly contradicted by the outcome of the gubernatorial primary, where Attorney General Jennifer Granholm won by 20 points over U.S. Representative David Bonior and former Governor Jim Blanchard. The United Auto Workers won big with Dingell and lost big with Bonior; Emily's List did the opposite with Rivers and Granholm. Second Amendment activists loved Dingell and disliked Rivers, but they had plenty more reason to detest Granholm, who took part in the unsuccessful effort to suspend the shall-issue concealed weapons law. Dingell's win was touted as a vote for the experienced candidate, but two highly experienced candidates for Governor lost to the relatively untested Granholm. And so on.

The one thing Granholm and Dingell had in common was much more campaign money to spend than their opponents, but I would argue that to be more a symptom than a cause of their success.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Friday, August 2, 2002, 8:00 am

Quick, breathless update: Tensions over the primary are at a fever pitch here, not just the congressional primary but also the primaries for governor, state senate, state rep, and county commissioner. The negative ads -- especially in the gubernatorial race -- are flooding the airwaves: we are hearing a lot from the throaty Scary Voice Lady (audio from Mock the Vote 2000), and prerecorded "robo-calls" with smears about candidates.

On Tuesday, I attended the funeral of my highly esteemed colleague Regula Herzog, who died of pancreatic cancer over the weekend. Characteristically, she worked almost to the end; most of us didn't know she was sick until just a few days ago when she could no longer come back to her office. Regula was involved in research on topics ranging from cognition among the elderly to control of urinary incontinence, worked closely with social scientists and psychologists and surgeons, was mentor to many graduate students.

On Wednesday, I stopped for a sandwich at an Ann Arbor coffee shop, and was startled a few minutes later when conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick Posthumus sat down at an adjoining table. "In person," I said softly, but Posthumus heard me and was obviously pleased to be recognized. We shook hands and chatted for a bit.

Posthumus, who is cruising to an easy victory in the Republican primary, is said by one of his backers to be "consistently underestimated". I guess time will tell, but I was underwhelmed.

Then another surprise: Posthumus was in this particular coffee shop to meet Washington Post columnist David Broder, who has been in Ann Arbor reporting on the Dingell/Rivers congressional primary. After Posthumus was interviewed and left, I introduced myself to Broder and we talked for a while about Michigan politics.

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran Broder's article on the Dingell vs. Rivers race:

[S]ources in both campaigns say television ads for Rivers have been making steady inroads in Dingell's old territory, especially among college-educated women. He, on the other hand, apparently has converted few if any of her supporters, male or female, in Ann Arbor, the spawning ground for physician-assisted suicide initiatives and other liberal causes.

That's also my impression (though note well, this liberal Ann Arborite is strongly opposed to the legalization of physician assisted suicide). Dingell supporters in Ann Arbor are few and almost furtive; polls are showing Rivers support at startlingly high levels. A 90% vote for the congresswoman in the city of Ann Arbor does not seem out of the question.

However, as if to prove the local saying, "The Ann Arbor News Hates Ann Arbor," our hometown paper has endorsed John Dingell. Given the sneering contempt that the Ann Arbor News' editorial voice usually takes toward local Democrats, the influence of its endorsement in a Democratic primary is questionable.

As I write this, another computer is churning out web files for the expanded, updated, and improved new version of my web site The Political Graveyard. It's the first complete new version of the site in over a year, and for the first time, there will be over 100,000 politicians listed.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December